Re: floptical drives and WHERE TO GET THEM!

[fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)]

In article <26nck7INNh32@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu> florpch@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Lawrence S Lee) writes:
>Since inCider is available only at a few locations around here, and since I
>have no access to them, and since they're usually sold out, I was wondering
>if anyone knew the phone number to Tulin or any other places that sell
>flopticals.

I just bought one (yay!).

Tulin: (408) 432-9057

For SF BA people, they're at Montague & 880 in San Jose.  That's about 5
miles from where I live, so I drove over and picked it up.

You pay $399 for the drive + case + power supply.  You can get the "raw"
mechanism for $250 or so, but you need your own extras.  The drive comes
with two floptical disks (worth about $40), both formatted with ProDOS.
They both have the full set of System 6.0 disks on them.

If you have a rev C SCSI or HS SCSI, you need their drivers, which they
give to you for free when you buy the drive.  If you have a RamFAST, you
don't need any drivers, but you MUST have ROM version 3.00L or greater
to be able to write to the drive without whacking your system.

(Sequential was selling 3.01c for $7.50 + s/h.  I'll be able to use it
as soon as FedEx shows up...)

Anyway.  You get a different manual depending on the card you have; I told
them I had a RamFAST but might be using it on an HS SCSI (good thing too,
since that's what I'm using now until my ROM upgrade arrives), so I got
the RamFAST manual but they threw in their drivers anyway.  BTW, you have
to remove Apple's SCSI drivers or your system will be very confused... the
Tulin drivers replace the SCSI manager and the SCSI HD driver.

(Dunno if you can boot off a floptical with the HS SCSI.  The manual I have
indicates that it works just fine with a RamFAST.)

Performance, at least with the HS SCSI, is real bad.  Lunatic says you can
volume-copy a floptical to a hard drive in 4 minutes, but manipulating
files (which requires random access instead of linear access) takes
forever.  I think it took about an hour to copy 20MB of files onto one.
Consequently, the best strategy is to make one or more HD partitions that
are the same size as a floptical; that way you can volume-copy the
floptical on, do whatever you're going to do, then volume-copy it back off.

They do read and write 720K and 1.44MB floppies, using the IBM PC encoding
format.  The MS-DOS FST is read-only (sigh), but it works for HFS and
ProDOS just fine.

-- 
fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
[ Above opinions are mine, Amdahl has nothing to do with them, etc, etc. ]